Feed Back Response

[Rhamses]

As I have said this before, the game is all about feed back response. This should be combined with Blizzard's desire to make the game as fun and as playable as possible.

I think the best way to do this is a separate UI for each class. Yup, I said it. If Blizzard wants to stay out in front of the MMO curve this is where they have to go next. There are basic elements that are the same for all, but then different classes need to "focus" on different things to make the classes play style different.

I really do not have enough time to do this concept justice at this time at (work on lunch). So, I just want to throw it out half baked so the crowd can run with it. If we think about the old 2D fighting games as more processing power became available, they tried to build on the games. But, they were limited by the UI. A simple Joystick. So, they advanced the controller. But, even that was quickly over run and it became 1/2 pull triger 2, while clicking the yellow and red buttons while licking the white one.

If a new player sits down to play wow and is left with the responsibility of dragging spells from the spell book and dropping them in arbitrary squares they will drive away many players who might become loyal fans if the learning curve was lowered.

Rhamses

[spiel2001]

Three things nUI 6.0 will do to address this...

• Shareable action bar profiles: It will be possible to create a "profile" for your action bars in 6.0 and save the profile. You can then copy that out of your saved variables file and make it available as a plugin to nUI with easy. I will be creating a template players can use to do that with. Once that's done, then it will be possible to create a library of pre-defined action bar setups players can pick and choose from as well as different bar sets for multi-spec and different playing roles (i.e... PvE versus raiding, versus BG, versus Arena bar sets)

• Player profiles: In 6.0 I am going to move the saved variables from per player back to account-wide which means you can save custom setups and have per-character layouts. The layout engine will allow you to create class-specific UI designs for nUI and like bar profiles, this will allow you create downloadable plugins players can pick and choose from to customize their nUI layout on a per character basis. And, as before, for dual specs, you can change layouts on the fly... so if you switch from DPS to healy, you can change you UI to a healy friendly layout versus a DPS layout.

• Integrated GUI layout tool: My goal is for all of the options we currently hand edit in nUI's layouts to have integrated GUI tools to customize. This info will be saved in the saved variables file as a library of UI elements which, again, can be easily carved out to create custom downloadable UI elements. This means that it would be easy to create a unit frame that's "best" for a DPS and another that's best for a healer, a tank, etc. and then build up a UI from that. These, too, would be shareable between players.

Hopefully, those three elements taken together mean that the nUI user community will be able to take their creativity past just the artwork and extend it into the entire layout/interface and create their own looks and layouts for nUI and share them. For "newb" players, this will mean they will have the option to download one of several healer layouts for nUI and just start playing without having to know how to do it themselves, set up action bars, write macros, etc. As their skill improves, then they can use nUI's built in tools to tweak their layout and, perhaps, eventually start contributing to the library of layouts.

Big goals... but that's pretty much what nUI 6.0 is about (besides adding the missing features and fixing the FPS bug)

[Rhamses]

Sounds interesting. I will have to reread what you wrote and translate it into my brain's way of thinking

Any button can respond differently to any one of 5 mouse buttons, not to mention the alts, ctrol, shift and all the combos. In addition, their is logic built right into the button to handle "Friend" and "Foe". It can do a simple spell cast or a complex macro.

People get confused and frightened by macros. But, what I think would help them out if there was an artificial layout. Still rolling it over in my mind.

Say the addon opened up a design sandbox linked to "1"

four boxes appear. One for Null-1. One for Alt-1, one for CTRL-1 and one Shift-1.

One button "1" can handle four spells depending on the extra key.

Another example and how I have been playing is click based

I have a single button window and I have it mapped to
left button. Right button. Alt Left Button and Alt Right button.
and this one "window" is also tied, to "Helpable" and "Harmable"

When we start to parse all the things that a button can resolve on its own, it significantly reduces the number of buttons required for game play. This saves screen realestate and I can make put off the need for bifocals for another year .

The trick here is it requires much more thought in advance. A lot of planning has to go into UIs like this. But, then it goes up even higher when I start using buff textures to modify the appearance of the button without changing its actual function to avoid taint.

Rhamses

[spiel2001]

One of the designs I'm working over in my head is how to deal with button configuration. I want to replicate what WoW does now in the action bars, but I also want to be able to extend it. On the one hand, I want power users to be able to take advantage of everything an action button can do while still allowing the novice user to just drop an action on the button and go.

I'm going to end up with something that's a basic "drag and drop a spell here for the click action" and "drag and drop a spell here for the right-click action" and such with an "advanced" button which will allow you to extend these abilities to include modifiers, help and harm, script snippets, macros, etc. I'm hoping I can do this in a way that most of the buttons abilities can be set up with GUI options and drag/drop while still allowing the true scripters and power users unfettered access.

We'll see how it turns out.

[Rhamses]

I think you are on the right track and we can get feed back from people here before you start the hard code.

Going back to different class play style. Unfortunetly, I never had the time to level up and play alts, so this is a step of imagination at my part.

When I look at a warrior play. The name of the game is rage. It is about building up rage, using it and trying to get to some sort of an equilibrium.

Rogues? it is about combo points and energy right? Like the assasin from Diablo ii?

Lock is watch the debuffs and respond to the occasional proc.

etc.

Then, we can also start to think about what is the best way to display the measure of xyz? There is the classic "bar". Now, we use some insights from TRIS (I will go into it this evening) and think how have others solved the problem.

CLassic Ruler.
Thermometer?
Speedometer?
digital display?

etc

Am I making any sense here?

Rhamses

[spiel2001]

That's more a personal preference and muscle memory thing. Some people like bars, some like gauges, others prefer just a digital display. There's no one "right" solution which is the difficulty in designing an interface like nUI for the mass market. In the end, you have to throw away the idea of telling people "this is how you do it" and making it possible for them to do it their way.